1906
San Francisco Earthquake
At 5:12 in the morning, the San Andreas Fault ruptured beneath San Francisco with a magnitude of 7.9. The earthquake cracked streets open; the fires that followed burned for three days and destroyed eighty percent of the city. Three thousand died, and a quarter of a million were left homeless. San Francisco rebuilt in a decade, on the same fault.
Dreadnought launched at Portsmouth
King Edward VII smashed a bottle of Australian wine across the bow of the biggest, fastest warship ever built. With its steam turbines and uniform big guns, HMS Dreadnought rendered every other battleship in the world obsolete overnight, including Britain's own considerable fleet. A naval arms race with Germany, one that would help poison European diplomacy for the next decade, now became inevitable.
Valparaiso earthquake
A magnitude 8.2 earthquake struck Chile's main port city, killing roughly three thousand and destroying much of the city in a few terrifying minutes. Tsunami waves crossed the Pacific to Hawaii and Japan. Chile's seismic vulnerabilities came into sharp relief, and Valparaiso, once South America's busiest Pacific port and a cosmopolitan jewel of the southern hemisphere, began a long decline it would never fully reverse.
San Francisco quake and fire
At 5:12 a.m. the ground heaved for forty-seven seconds and broke gas lines across the city. Fires raged for three days, consuming twenty-eight thousand buildings. More than three thousand died. The insurance payouts toppled firms from London to Hamburg. The city was rebuilt in a decade and a new kind of disaster coverage was born.
HMS Dreadnought and naval arms race
Britain's launch of the all-big-gun HMS Dreadnought rendered every other battleship obsolete, but it also erased Britain's comfortable naval lead at a single stroke. Germany, sensing opportunity, accelerated its shipbuilding under the direction of Admiral Tirpitz. The race to build more and bigger dreadnoughts poisoned Anglo-German relations and, by 1914, helped turn a Balkan crisis into a world war.
Upton Sinclair publishes The Jungle
A young socialist's novel about immigrant Chicago meatpacking workers and the filth of their trade was meant to indict capitalism. What it did instead was disgust the American middle class about its sausages. Within months Theodore Roosevelt had signed the first federal food and drug law. I aimed for the heart, Sinclair said, and hit the stomach.